Episode One

So, uh, I shall begin another blog post with the word "So". So yeah, the first eighth of That Thing has been uploaded to the internet. Free for the world to see, to judge, to be entertained by or to move on and be entertained by the millions of other video things that compete for that brief blink of an eye that constitutes our lives. It is out there and I can finally stop trying to hype it up or make excuses. If you're curious enough, by all means please watch. I would appreciate it. Hopefully you'll dig it enough to seek out the next episode and so on, subscribe and maybe even comment, if it stirs up enough emotion and motivation in you to do so. Whatever you please.



I've been finding it difficult to write this entry, for at least a few reasons. Already at a third attempt at trying to definitively put down the last word on That Thing, and perhaps that's why it's not coming out easily. I've wanted that thing to end for years now, never to waste another thought on it. But here I am noodling on words for a vaguely egotistical purpose, thinking somebody actually wants to hear the how and why we made this thing. I suppose if nothing else it would be good to get this out now, a confessional while I can still remember what went on while making it. But nah. Ain't feeling it.

Simply put, the shooting of that thing wasn't that interesting. No real drama or anything, the shoots themselves came and went mostly without a hitch. Maybe we ran over schedule once or twice, but otherwise the shooting wasn't interesting. To me, the editing was the entertaining part, a slow decent into madness and such, but that's the part I actually wrote about in earlier entries of this blog. I don't think I could come up with any neat stories of behind the scenes happenings. Makes it difficult to come up with anything worth reading.

More importantly though, I don't want to sit here and explain That Thing. If I had to do that, then what was the point of doing it in the first place? That'll accomplish nothing but spoil whatever the viewer had in mind, taint their mental image of the flick. The one screening we had sometime last year, it was an alright evening. Got to watch the movie with a few other folks who were all going in completely blind, the best way to see a movie. But what happened after, the post screening Q&A, that wasn't fun, at least for me. People asked the obvious questions, the why was this like this or that like that. And I dislike answering those questions. If the viewer cared enough to ask, they should care enough to take a second to think about why it was done that way in the first place, right?

Don't mean to get on a high horse about that sort of thing, it's that borderline pretentious half of me speaking. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't really feel like saying anything. Sorry about that. If you have a question I'll try to answer it, but I'm not contributing anything more to this conversation other than the work itself. Hopefully it speaks for itself.

Near a week away...

Yo, it's been a while. Haven't been feeling the urge to write lately, a lot of nonsense on the mind, most of which wouldn't make for good reading. Wouldn't want to subject you to that.

So what's been going on? First off, I wrote up an entry describing some of the trials and tribulations that were run into during the making of That Thing, at least the ones I could recall while not getting far into the specifics. It's over at a cool blog called “Tell Me About Your Movie” and my entry is one among near a dozen other directors takes on their first features. Not surprisingly, I'm probably more down on myself than most of the others, but I suppose that's par for the course. Check it out over here.

Other bit of stuff resembling news: That Thing is finally being put on the internet on May fifteenth, two-thousand and eleven. Took long enough I suppose. Only held off for as long as I did because of a desire to actually see it played at a festival, not too much luck in that regard. Maybe luck is the wrong word, but it is the word I use whenever I run into someone asking how that whole process is going. What else could I say? Simply put, the movie ain't that good, not better than the likely hundreds or thousands of other feature length films also competing for the handful of spots. I've accepted that, but when you tell someone that it feels like you're fishing for a compliment. Nothing to do in that situation but shrug your shoulders and blame luck for your misfortune.

So it didn't happen. So now I'm going to put it on the internet in hopes of having at least a few folks watch it. And it's weird because now I gotta try to convince people to click on a link and spend at least a few minutes every few weeks on something that only a paragraph ago I admitted to not being that good. It's an awkward paradox. I mean, I don't think it's bad, but of course I'm going to hate it, but does that mean that it's actually bad or do I hate it because I made it or... and so goes the conversation that takes place in my head every time. In any case, it's happening so I might as well make the best of it, self-deprecating blog aside. Spread the word, hope it garners at least a few new fans by the end of it all, get some momentum going, try and build an audience for the next thing.


Put together a new trailer for the date, check it out. Once it starts coming out check back here, I'll probably be recalling whatever comes to mind back when we were making it. It'll be as close as you're going to get to a director's commentary from me.

One last thing to get out of the system.
Fear has been on the mind lately. Trying to figure out where it comes from, its purpose. The chemical reaction it ignites both in the human mind and body. I guess it started back when we were more primitive creatures, stopping our crude minds from doing stupid shit and making our bodies run full tilt when danger approaches. We've inherited that mechanism, but despite being self-conscious of it we still don't understand or have control over it. Well, maybe some, that's why there's always a two-hour wait for the latest roller coaster at Six Flags. The thing I'm trying to figure out is why fear is so capable of both paralyzing and motivating at the same time. Even the simplest of acts, ones so second nature as to continue the propagation of the human race can be caught up in the mind and trapped by fear. For years one could be caught in that loop of not daring to do anything for fear of that unknown.

But of course it works the other way around too. Once that threshold is reached, the fight or flight instinct kicks in and now you're pushing harder than you have the rest of your life. Just like that. A switch is flipped and now steps are being taken to make up for lost time. The big problem with this though is that instead of running on confidence and courage you're still running on fear. At least you're going in the right direction, but there's going to be some stumbling along the way. And what happens when that fear runs out of juice, do we slow to a stop? Just give up? Or is the human will to live (living in its many definitions) persistent enough to endure?

Just a small sample of what runs through my mind at three in the am. Night, folks.